BERNINA Machine Training: Embroidery Basics | Quilt Beginnings

hi i'm katie at quilt beginnings in dublin ohio and today we're going to talk about all of the basic embroidery setup and how to embroider on your bernina machine this is going to apply to the 5 7 and 8 series machines there are a couple of differences that we're going to go over in the video but this is going to be the first video that you want to watch to get you started embroidering we'll have another one coming out with some of the more advanced plus features on those top-of-the-line machines but all the techniques and basic um the basics really are what we're going to cover in this video so the first thing that you want to think about when you go to embroider is stabilizer and thread make sure that you're set up for success my friend pam has a wonderful video on stabilizers but you want to understand that there are three basic types based on how they come off of the embroidery so a stabilizer is going to sit behind your fabric and it's going to really help protect the fabric from shrinking or gathering as you get a lot of thread and stitches onto your material there's a tear away there's a cut away and there's a wash away type of stabilizer for the basics we're just going to talk about tearaway that's really what i'm going to use 80 of the time if i don't have a super dense design if i'm doing basic embroidery embroidery is so fun because there are so many types of projects you can do and as you get more into it you're going to learn what the right techniques are and what the right setup is for those projects at that time but in this video we're just going to go through the basic process so you can learn your machine and get ready to take on those more advanced projects one thing i do want to mention is bernina has a wonderful reference book called the big book of embroidery and that book is going to help you with those different projects different techniques all the ways to set you up for success as you get really into embroidering on your machine when it comes to thread just like with stabilizer it's really going to depend on exactly what type of project you're doing and what results you want the basic thread that you're going to use for embroidery probably 90 of the time is a 40 weight polyester we love isocord and floriani brands but any 40 weight polyester is going to get you really good results it's a strong thread it's a nice heavy weight so you get a good lustrous look when you do your embroidery in the bobbin we tend to use a 60 weight thread it can be either polyester or cotton and i use white 90 of the time because i'm not going to see the back of my embroidery the lighter weight thread is going to help pull the heavier weight thread on top to the back so you'll get a nice wrap like if you think of a satin stitch embroidered letter you really want the top thread to wrap around the back and a 60 weight bobbin thread is going to help you get that also to get set up for embroidery you need to be sure that you have your embroidery foot and your embroidery stitch plate on the embroidery foot typically is going to be the number 26 foot if you're doing couching or something a little bit different then you would use a different foot but again 90 of the time you'll use your number 26 embroidery foot the single hole stitch plate is going to make sure that you don't get any flagging or any bunching up underneath your stitch plate so i use the single hole stitch plate the zero millimeter and when we go into the details in this video i'll show you how to tell the machine that you have that stitch plate on so that when you go back to sewing you don't break a needle when you go to zigzag but making sure you have that single hole stitch plate on will help support the fabric and make sure that you get beautiful results as you are embroidering first let's attach the embroidery module this is going to be the same way on the 7 series and the 8 series i'll show the fives in just a second your embroidery module has two plastic black tabs those just lift up and slide into the holes you set the machine down and that module should give a little chirp to let you know that it's on correctly to take it off you just reverse it you lift up and slide straight out so let's see that one more time on the sevens and eights you have two black plastic tabs that are going to slide into these two little holes you lift up and tilt from the side and just slide straight in when you set it down the module should chirp to take it out you lift from the side and pull straight out on the 5 series the module is a little different and goes on in a different way there's a handle on the left and when you squeeze it you can slide the module straight in and release to take it off it's just that in reverse you squeeze the handle and pull straight out in every case you never want to move the machine and the module together even if you're just scooting that machine a little bit you want to be sure to take the module off before moving the machine so for u880 owners you will need to thread the bobbin differently for embroidery than you do for regular sewing in order to get ready for embroidery you open the bobbin door remove the bobbin and when you go to put it back in the first step is exactly the same as before you want to be sure that it goes into the little slit pull it to the left and spin it around but now we want to pull the thread and slide down this metal stitch finger the thread should catch just a little bit before the far back of this stitch finger you want the thread to be there where you know that it's in the spring once it's there i can come back and cut it and i know that it's ready for embroidery to show you the difference if i just thread it for sewing i pull it to the right and get it into that slit when i pull it back now if i just pull that thread over it goes all the way to the back of the metal piece that is not threaded for embroidery i want to pull it back to the left down the stitch finger and you probably at this point just want to take it out and start over for embroidery so we go through our slit back to the left down the middle finger and make sure that that thread catches before the end of the metal piece come back cut the thread close the door and you are ready to start embroidering so let's talk about hooping fabric all of your machines come with this hoop which is the large oval hoop we always want to just loosen it up as much as possible in order to take the two pieces apart this bottom piece is what's going to go onto your machine i start with it flat on the table and i recognize that on this inside hoop there's a small triangle down at the bottom that small triangle lines up with the small triangle on the outer hoop that's how i know to put it in this way and not upside down not backwards i want those two triangles to be lined up so here i have a piece of a medium weight tear away stabilizer and a fabric you can spray base these if you want some of them have you know there are sticky sides things like that that you can kind of get things to adhere together if you just use a piece of medium weight tearaway and a fabric they'll stay together well enough by the tension of the hoop i lay the fabric and the stabilizer onto my hoop and i usually start and turn this around i usually start at the bottom and sort of get that piece in and i just work my way around the hoop pushing it in i am not the straightest hoover there are lots of different techniques and ways and tools that you can do this a little bit better but it just takes practice i'm going to tighten up my screw and then the last thing that i'm going to do after i hook my fabric is i'm going to go all the way around and just push out so there is a tiny lip just a sixteenth of an inch or so of stabilizer and fabric so that way when my hoop is moving around on my machine i don't have plastic scratching away on my free arm i have a nice layer of stabilizer and fabric just be careful that you don't push that all the way through and then you'll have to re-hoop there is one other type of hoop that's very easy to use this one is the maxi hoop it also comes in a midi size and a jumbo size what's really nice about these hoops is that to release it i just press my little buttons and once i hoop my fabric and stabilizer i ratchet it and it's done it's very easy to use these hoops and i highly recommend them if you are going to be doing a lot of embroidery whenever you see this animation it is a hoop getting put onto the machine and that's your machine telling you it wants you to put the hoop on so let's look at how to do that to put on your embroidery hoop we're going to pinch these two pieces together what this does is it enables these two rectangles here to line up with the two metal rectangles on your module so we pinch those together we slide our hoop under our foot so make sure that your presser foot is all the way up we line up those rectangles and they should go straight down once they're down you can let go and your hoop is on the machine the animation will go away from your screen telling you to put that hoop on as soon as it recognizes that the hoop is on correctly so now that we have our fabric hooped we have our module on let's go in and look at some of the embroidery settings that are going to really make sure that you're set up for success on your machine one of the first things that we want to do is whenever you first get your embroidery machine you need to calibrate your large oval hoop if you ever do an update or you get a new midi hoop maxi hoop jumbo hoop you'll need to calibrate those hoops too you only really have to do it once until you do a software update then you might need to do it again or if the machine just the needle isn't in the center when you think it should be you might want to calibrate your hoop so to do that we go into settings on the fives remember you have to go to your home button first and then go into your gears when we go into our gears there's a hoop icon which is our embroidery settings we go into our hoop icon and the hoop with the crosshair in the middle that's our calibration so when we go to calibrate the machine you want to be sure that you have your clear plastic template that goes with the hoop this plastic template attaches to the hoop with these two little clips these clips you've got quite a few of them that are going to go on to the sides of your template and they just weave into the plastic and once they're on they really can't come off which is why i can't show you how to put them back on it just slides in and slots into the hoop on exactly where where it should be fitted the bernina you want to be sure faces up so you can read it and that's the direction that you put those clips on and put the template onto the hoop now we get to calibrate the machine our goal is to have our needle hit the very center hole of our template this is the one time that i really do use my hand wheel on my bernina so as i bring my hand wheel i can see that here my needle is off of the center of that hoop i want to raise my needle back up before i move the hoop these arrows are going to move the hoop the opposite direction of what the arrow says so if i want my hoop to go up i hit my up arrow and my needle is coming down in the hoop i check again and that looks like i'm pretty much right in the center you really only have to do this once but once you get it in the center using these arrows raise that needle back up and hit your green check and your hoop is calibrated now that we've calibrated our hoop let's look at a couple of other settings in the embroidery menu there are a few that i think are very helpful for setting us up for success as we embroider one of those is my jump stitch menu right now there's three different options in the jump stitch menu the first one is to make sure that my machine will cut the thread between every color change we definitely want it to do this so i leave this one on the next one is making sure that it's the machine is actually going to pause to let me cut my thread tail this can be helpful in edge to edge embroidery but i usually will just let the machine keep running and i'll actually pause it myself if and when i need to cut my thread tail so i usually leave this one off the next one is my jump stitch length it defaults to six millimeters which means your machine will leave any jump stitch that's six millimeters or smaller for you to cut i would rather have the machine cut those jump stitches for me so i always change this down to one millimeter and then it's going to cut all the jump stitches and leave a really clean embroidery underneath i'm going to use my bread crumbs to go back into my embroidery menu and we'll look at another option that's very helpful what they call the thread away mode that's this needle with the two little arrows going back and forth i make sure this is turned on this is where when you start to embroider you will notice when your machine does a a quick movement of the hoop at the beginning and end of the embroidery this really pulls the thread tails under and make sure that they're really neat and you don't have anything that you need to snip and clean up at the end so i just make sure that one is turned on back in my embroidery menu i also look at the automatic tie off that's this needle with the little tie off icon this is saying that any designs that you get that are not digitized to already have a tie on or a tie off your machine is smart enough to be able to add those so this first one is a tie on at the beginning the second one is a tie off at the end i just make sure these are both turned on you will never really notice when these settings are taking place but it's going to ensure that if you get a design that doesn't have this already built in your embroidery will not come undone your machine is going to do a tie on for you let's look at a couple of other settings in the embroidery menu just as a quick overview you do have a global tension setting i really leave that one alone my bernina knows the right tension i might go in and adjust in the actual embroidery edit screen but here i usually leave it alone i do have a speedometer again i usually use my actual physical knob for speed limit on the front of the machine but if you have small children or anybody who might be playing with that knob on the front of the machine you can put a speed limit on here that's just another option for you to play with you also have a measurement tape where you can switch between millimeters and inches if you use a software program a lot of them are going to be in millimeters millimeter is kind of the universal language in in many ways for embroidery designs because you can get a lot more precise with it however we're in the us here and we often like to think in inches so you have the freedom to choose what measurement type your machine is going to show you if i go back into embroidery settings those are really the main ones that i'm going to use you do have a fabric thickness option that's this one here typically your fabric thickness is going to be about four millimeters that's the general stabilizer and a thin layer of cotton that we typically use if you're doing a towel or doing something that is a little bit thicker you can come in here and set it to whatever is more correct for that project this is the one setting that the machine will actually reset when you turn it off and back on so when you do a towel if you turn off your machine you come back this setting is going to go back to the default so that you're set up for success on the next sort of regular cotton fabric that you're going to be stitching on so now let's get started in our embroidery menu i'm in my home screen now where i can choose between sewing and embroidering and when i go into embroidery if i have a 5 or a 7 series machine it's going to remind me to put my feed dogs down very important to have my feed dogs down in embroidery for you eight series owners your machine is going to automatically lower the feed dogs for you so no need to worry there when i come up into my embroidery menu the first thing that we're going to see is some folders embroidery really walks through these four steps the first one here is file selection i can always get back to here just by touching on the right hand side of the screen you have two different options for where to get a file it defaults to inside the machine but if i have a usb stick that has designs on it then i can actually go to the usb stick here and i'm going to pull in those designs your bernina's preferred format is a dot exp so if you purchase a design you're going to get all the different file formats for all the different machines you would really want to select just the exp designs put those onto a usb stick the usb stick usually should be one gigabyte or smaller you don't want to use a giant usb stick the machine just is looking and looking and looking and can't find what it's looking for so use a one gigabyte stick and put just the dot exp files on it and then your designs would show up here that you could select for today we're going to stay in our machine's default designs we have three folders here on the 790 590 and 880 you'll have a fourth folder where you can actually pull in stitches from your sewing side but the basic folders are your letters your designs and your favorites let's start by pulling up a design when i go into my butterfly i have all my different subfolders that i then can open up and look through there's lots of built-in designs and lots of fun things that you can explore if we go into folder two i can see that there's actually more designs down below and i can scroll to see all the different options i'll just select one and it's going to open up on my screen whenever i open a design the machine is going to put that design into the hoop that fits it best i can see what hoop that is just on the left here it selected the medium hoop for me the medium square hoop you get some additional pieces of information on your screen right when you pull up a design you see that it takes 18 minutes for this design to stitch out completely and you also see the dimensions of the design in this case it's three inches by 4.1 inches on the right hand side in our color menu you can see that it takes eight different colors of thread of course whatever thread you put on is going to be what it stitches out in so if you just stitched it out in all one color it would be all one color but it's going to have eight different color changes in this case now let's look along the left hand side and we see some additional things my tension setting here is going to apply to just this design once again i really do not change my tension unless there's something very specific that i'm going for usually the machine is going to know the right tension to get you the right results next i see a little exclamation point this is indicating that i need to make sure the machine knows i have my number 26 embroidery foot on there are a few other feet that i can use i don't necessarily have to use a 26 but i do want to go into this menu and select which of the optional feet i have i almost always use the 26 unless i'm doing couching or something else specific so i'm going to select the 26 foot and i see that it's indicating yes you have it you're good i also want to remember to tell my machine that i have my single hole stitch plate on right now it thinks i have the nine millimeter i can stitch out with my nine millimeter on however if i'm doing really much embroidery at all i'm going to get better results by that's using that single hole and whenever i put that single hole on i want my machine to remind me not to do a zigzag when i go back to sewing so i'll just go into that nine millimeter and tell the machine i have my single hole stitch plate on i do see that my feed dogs are down because the zigzag is underneath the straight line so that is good well x out of there and now we can go into our hoop menu like i said before the medium hoop is the hoop that fits this design best i will get the best results if i use the hoop that the machine recommends however there may be times when i am fitting something one design in or i'm adding multiple designs or i really just want to use a different size hoop for whatever reason and i have that freedom when i touch on my hoop menu i can see every hoop that works with my machine the one thing to note on the 7 series is that you can actually fit the jumbo hoop but you will have the same stitch field as the maxi hoop it's going to tell you down below what your stitch field is for every different hoop so the biggest hoop that the 770 can use is that maxi hoop let's say that we want to select the oval hoop now it puts my design into the oval hoop and i can see how it's going to fit and gives me the freedom then to move it around and arrange it exactly where i want it i have a few other options here i have different park menus this is where if i'm going back to my sewing side i would want to park my embroidery module with that arm all the way to the left before i do that to kind of get it out of my way when i go back to sew the arm on this machine is already all the way to the left which is why when i touch this nothing much happens if i scroll down i have a grid option where i can get a crosshair right in the center i can get a lot of different grids that are going to match the grid on the templates which can help for positioning or i can turn it off completely i have a bullseye option where right now my little bullseye crosshair that is at the very start point of my design and is indicating to me where the needle is going to go for the very first stitch of the design if i touch that bullseye it then moves to the center of the design so these are just some different options as you get into editing that are going to be helpful i'll just put it back to the start point let's x out of here for the moment and i'm going to show you if you just want to get to sewing exactly how to do that we're in edit right now that's this pencil i can skip all the way down to stitch out and when i touch my stitch out my embroidery arm moves over and now i get this animation once again showing me i need to put my hoop on the machine whenever i see that animation there's nothing wrong it just means i need to put the hoop on and then it can continue so i'm going to slide my hoop under the foot and put it on just like we did before and once it's on now it's telling me hey i have a hoop on and i'm going to be moving around so make sure nothing's blocking that embroidery arm or getting in the way when i hit the check mark i go to the start point of my first color and i can scroll through each color to see what's going to stitch out when i can just go back up to number one and as soon as i see a green flashing light on the front of my machine i am ready to stitch out so if you just want to get started sewing that's the way to do it for others we might want to do a little bit more editing first so let's go back up into our edit menu there are a lot of ways that we can edit a design right on our embroidery screen without needing software without needing anything else we can do a lot of customization just within the machine itself all of this is going to be inside of our information menu the first thing that we might want to do is move the design around i have two ways of doing this i can actually touch the design and move it and you'll notice that your embroidery hoop and arm are moving with your design on the screen when that's the case it kind of helps do exact precise positioning where you can get the design right where you want it but it might be a little bit of a hassle if you're moving it all over and that design and that hoop are moving with you so if you wanted to turn that option off you go back into your hoop menu and this butterfly down at the bottom you just turn that off and now your hoop won't move until you come back and turn this back on when i x out of that now i can move my design around with my finger and the arm itself doesn't move and kind of get in my way the other way that i can move designs if i touch into my crosshair menu i see my x and y coordinates so i get to remember back to geometry and i can kind of remember back to my x coordinate is my left to right my y is my up and down so right now i'm at negative 156 if i just touch that x now my design is centered left to right i can use my multi-function knobs the top one is going to move it left to right just one little dot at a time the bottom one is going to move it up and down one little dot at a time and that's going to give me a way to very precisely and exactly get that design right where i want it i can also touch my y and that's going to center it up and down but leave it where i had it left to right if i get my design way off track i can just hit this center and now my design is right in the center at x 0 and y 0. so again these knobs are going to be my friend for just bumping it exactly where i want it once i kind of get it roughly where i want it with moving my design with my finger so a couple different ways that i can move the design around i'll go back into my eye and we'll look at some other options just like on our sewing side you can see that anything that's in yellow is something that i have altered so my design is not directly in the center of my hoop and i can tell that because i can look at it but i can also see that i've made a change because it's outlined in yellow next let's look at rotation that's my circle with the arrow on it i have an option to just rotate it 90 degrees at a time so that's a very helpful tool or if i want to rotate it just a little bit one degree at a time i can use my multi-function knobs either one of them is going to rotate it around the circle one degree at a time just like before if i want to put it back to normal or back to default i touch whatever is yellow and it goes right back to the default setting i go back into my eye and we can look at resizing this next icon here is my resize icon it's going to default to a ratio maintaining icon so that means that as i change one of the dimensions using my multi-function knob they both change so it's getting taller and wider at the same time if i only want it to go one direction at a time so get really skinny i just touch the unlink button and then i can change each of these dimensions separately so i can make it tall and skinny i can kind of distort it however i want again just like before i can touch whatever's yellow and put it back to the default i usually leave that link on because i usually want my design to change proportionally so let's say that i want to make it a little bit bigger proportionally that's the way to do it something to be careful about when resizing designs is to know that your machine does not recalculate stitches as you resize them that means that the same number of stitches are going to happen no matter what size you put it at so you're usually safe to resize plus or minus about 20 so down to about 80 or up to about 120 if i go any farther than that i'm going to get very weird not very pretty results when my stitches are either way too small or way too big if you wanted to resize beyond that you really would want to use embroidery software but as long as i'm within plus or minus 20 i have total freedom to change my size go back into my eye and the next couple of options are pretty fun but pretty simple i just have a mirror image left and right or a mirror image up and down so this way i can kind of flip my designs around and get them to look exactly how i want them to next i have a duplicate option so if i wanted two of these paisleys when i touch duplicate i have two of these designs right on my screen now i kind of see that i have multiple trays here so whatever one is in color and is highlighted is the design that i'm editing so right now i'm in tray two if i wanted to edit the one behind it i can either touch it with my finger or touch the tray that corresponds with that so this is tray one two is the other one sometimes it's like okay i hit the duplicate accidentally i want to get rid of one of these trays i only want one paisley just hit your little trash can and it's going to ask are you sure you want to delete it yes i'm sure now i'm back to just one similarly if i wanted to delete whatever is on this screen completely i can just delete this even though it's my last design so no i actually i don't want to delete that i want to leave this one on the screen so i hit my red x and it didn't delete next i have a very helpful positioning tool it's called check now check is going to let me check what these four corners of the design are going where they're going to be so when i hit this check piece it's going to take my crosshair my needle up to the very top left corner and my hoop is going to move and if you don't have your hoop on you're going to get an animation telling you you need to put the hoop on because this doesn't work without a hoop right now i'm in the top left corner and i can look on my fabric and see exactly where that needle is going to be exactly where kind of that top left of the design is going to be i can go to the bottom left the bottom right and the top right and get a feel for exactly where my design is going to stitch out if i'm not happy with that positioning i have the ability with my multi-function knobs to move it just a little bit you know one little one little bit at a time and kind of get precise with exactly where i want that design to stitch out if i want my bullseye to go right in the center of the design so my bullseye is my needle if i want my needle to go right in the center so i can see where the center is i just touch that center icon and then i can again go back up to the left bottom right whatever it is and make sure that i'm happy with where it's going to stitch out by x out of here that's all of the editing that we need to do with this design a couple of other things i do want to mention sometimes we have a design on the screen and we want to add a second element what we tend to do is go up into our folder and open up a new design this is one way to basically open a design and erase everything that we just did so watch what i do if i touch on that my paisley disappears so if you didn't want that to happen so say all right we we didn't want the paisley actually we want this tree and we want it down here in this bottom half of the of the design on bottom half of the hoop and maybe i want it centered left to right so i got it in the bottom half but i moved it to the left a little bit i can go into my crosshair i can touch my x coordinate and now it's perfectly centered left to right but is down in the bottom half of that hoop now i want to put something up in the top of this hoop so when i x out of this area what i don't want to do is i don't want to go up to this folder i want to just add a layer add a tray and when i touch on that add icon once again i'm back in the folder that i was in let's say that i want to go into a different folder i can just use my breadcrumbs to go back to that design butterfly i can pick a different folder let's say number three and pick any design here how about this one designs always default to coming in in the center of the hoop but i can see that the these flowers are in color i have tray number two highlighted and i have the freedom now to just move and edit this flower separate from the design i already had in the hoop i can go into my eye i can rotate let's do plus 90 so that it goes along the top and now i have two designs in the hoop i can edit each of them individually or i can select them all together and move them both together so this bottom tray is always going to be my whole design everything that i have on the screen so i just want to be sure that we don't accidentally do all this work and then when we x out go in and open up a new design and erase everything that we just did one thing that i can do is i can save this design once i'm really happy with my flowers and my tree and i think that they're right where i want them i can go into my folder and just like on the sewing side i can save into my favorites so that's this arrow going into my hearts folder it's going to show me a little image of it with the yellow around saying is this where you want it and yep i want to save that in my heart and now when i go back to get to get designs out if i go into my heart folder that's what i'm going to see there one thing to note is that when i am on each of the individual trays my icons will indicate the time and the dimensions of that design so i can look at each one individually or i can use my down arrow and select everything altogether and i can see this whole design will take 20 minutes and what the total dimensions are so let's say that i want to pull in a name instead of these flowers first let's go select just tray number two we'll delete these flowers so i'll go into my eye and i'll hit the trash can and say yep i am sure but i do want to put some initials just like before if i want to add an element i touch my plus on the tray and now it's taking me into my folder so i can select my letter folder i can select a font and i can type whatever initials i want just like before it's going to bring those designs in right in the center of the hoop so i can pull them up to the top i can go into my positioning i can center them left to right and then i can resize because i might actually want those to be a lot bigger so what i said before about the plus and minus 20 the only exception is with letters my machine actually has the ability to recalculate how many stitches go into a letter so i can make these as big or as small as i want i just have to take one additional step afterwards so let's make it way bigger i want these to take up the whole kind of the whole space these are my initials they're going to be my monogram they're not really my initials they're just three random letters but they look great but i noticed that i have these up to 167 percent if i just stitch these out now i'm going to get some very weird results the density is going to be really really low i'm going to have a lot of white space the stitches are going to be too long it's just not going to get great results so the next step i have to do when i go back into my eye is this last icon here stitch density what we want to understand is that if i go up 167 in size a good kind of rule of thumb starting point is to increase the density by a similar amount so i can go up to about 167 but in this case you know these letters are or they're a satin stitch they typically are going to be a satin stitch where it um you know it just goes left to right along the whole width of that letter and it still might not get me exactly the results that i'm looking for so if i'm doing letters and i'm changing them a lot i usually will do some stitch out practice before i go right onto my project the other option that i have is this option where if i turn it on i can tell the machine to switch from a satin stitch which again is just one big stitch from left to right of the letter i can actually switch it to a step stitch and that's going to be another kind of fill stitch but you're going to get much better results on your letters it's going to default to a step stitch if any satin is bigger than eight millimeters and you can play with this if you want it to be a step stitch you know as long as it's seven millimeters wide or wider you can play with that but you're going to want to play with stitch density and with that step stitch option as you're doing lettering and making them bigger if we made our letters smaller we would not need to do the step stitch option because a satin stitch would be sufficient it can still go left to right over the entire letter but we would want to reduce our density because otherwise you're going to get these really really really tight tight designs and tight tight letters so if we made our letter 60 size we would start by going down to about 60 percent density that's going to be a good starting point like i said you're going to want to do some practice stitch outs before you really do this all the way so i'm going to take this all the way up to 160 just as a start i'm going to turn on my step stitch option and when i hit the green check it's going to do some recalculation and what that means is that now these letters have been re-digitized with those specifications the main thing to remember is that if you are changing your letters more than 20 up or down you need to go into your stitch density and adjust it to match the similar direction do some stitch out trial practice but you will see the difference when you're sewing it out now that i have my hoop with my design my full design i've got initials i've got a design this is what i'm happy with when i x out i can just go down this column and go to my next step my color menu my color menu is telling me that i have seven different thread changes i can use these arrows to go through and scroll and see what exactly is it going to stitch out with each step so this third step that's going to be some of these little trunk some of the light trunk pieces the fourth step will be the red leaves the fifth step is the yellow leaves so i can scroll through and really see and get a feel for what the machine is going to stitch in what order the last thing is going to do is the letters your machine defaults to a certain brand of thread so whatever brand of thread it's showing you is actually the brand and the color number that it's recommending for this design you have the ability to change what brand it tells you about if i go into this little recycling icon i can either select a different color within this brand or i can select a different brand and there are many many brands of thread inside of here so let's say that we're using floriani once i'm in my floriani menu if i touch this thread change icon it's going to change every color in the design to the corresponding floriani color i can go back into my color menu and now if that's what i've got in my local quilt store if that's what i've got in my stash it gives me different color number recommendations so 153 for the top one and it will take two minutes to stitch out 809 for the second color and it will take one minute to stitch out it's going to give me these recommendations of course whatever i put in the machine is what it's actually going to sew with so if i put a bright blue first thread number two it's going to stitch my trunk in blue but i can kind of plan it out by going in here first and scrolling to a blue and then i can see and audition what that's going to look like some people really like to audition things first some people just want to speed through this step it is up to you you have total flexibility once i'm happy with the thread colors i can go down to stitch out and just like before my hoop is going to move and take my needle to the very first starting stitch of the first design you might notice that the 51 minutes is a lot longer than what we saw in our edit menu this has to do with my speed slider my speed slider on this machine was down about halfway if i go back into edit and back into stitch out once i've moved my speed slider to the fastest speed you'll see that it changed now to 27 minutes so it really depends on how fast you're running your machine if i'm doing a standard not super dense design using 40 weight polyester thread i usually will have my machine running about full speed if i'm using metallic thread or doing a really dense design or very small micro letters things like that then i might want to run my machine slower you will figure this out as you do and practice your embroidery either way once we're started to stitch out we have a couple of different options just within this menu the first one here is a basting box if you're using a towel for example and you've got a terry cloth surface you might want to use a topper to help prevent your stitches from sinking down into that terry cloth if you use a topper you would want your machine to baste that down because otherwise it's going to get all jumbled up inside your design so that's when you would use a basting box you have two options for basting box the first one was just around the design the second one is all the way around the outline of the hoop if you don't want a basting box you touch it again and it turns off that option the next option that i want to be sure i have turned on is my jump stitch option i definitely want my machine to cut my jump stitches i don't want to do it it has that ability let's let it do its thing i can also turn the entire design into a mono color so this icon here that goes from red green blue to all green if i touch that icon it's going to sew everything without stopping for thread changes that can be really really helpful if i actually want everything to sew in one color but if i don't i want to be sure that that turns off and my machine will prompt me to change thread color when i need to next i've got a rabbit and i i like to turn that on just for a little extra speed boost if i am confident in my design and i'm confident in my thread and i know i'm getting good results when i turn that on it now only will take 22 minutes but again i want to be careful that i'm not using that if it's a dense design or something where my machine is really doing a lot of work i want to let it take its time and just stitch out exactly how it needs to so we're about ready to stitch once you have everything set up you've got your 40 weight thread up top you've got your 60 weight thread down below you have your fabric hooped up you've edited your design you've looked at the colors let's get ready to stitch and to do that we just press and hold our green go button it wakes up and it starts to sew oh no we have a thread break this will happen sometimes and it is nothing to be alarmed by when i have a thread break my machine's going to tell me hey you probably aren't threaded up above anymore because our thread broke so i can x out of this menu obviously the first thing that i want to do is i want to re-thread the machine if there was a jam or something like that i want to take out my bobbin clean out behind my hook make sure it's got oil make sure my machine from a hardware perspective is running smoothly but once i'm re-threaded i probably have gone about 15 or 20 stitches past where the thread actually ran out so i'm gonna need to go back in time i want to make sure that i have a really smooth embroidery and that no one can ever tell that i broke a thread here so to do that my machine is going to give me this menu this is my little s with an x that's my stitch broke my thread broke icon and i see two different sides to this image on the left i have my whole design and this crosshair this bullseye is where my needle is right now on the right hand side i have a zoom in close-up of every single stitch that it's doing so i can use my top knob to go backwards i'm going to the left i'm going backwards about one stitch at a time or if i broke a thread way back or i need to go back for some reason or another my bottom knob is going to go back about 15 or 20 stitches at a time i broke this thread right at the beginning because i wanted to show you but i can also jump forward and you can see i'm jumping forward and i'm jumping all over this design just really quickly with this bottom knob if i touch this yellow it's going to go back to the the exact stitch that the machine recognized we broke that thread on so i'm here and i want to go backwards again about 15 stitches i can look at my needle as i'm going and this is another time i might use my hand wheel to lower the needle down to make sure that i'm back again about you know 10 or 15 stitches behind where my thread broke so that i'm going to get a nice coverage of those stitches once i'm on the right stitch that i want to start on all i do is i hit the go button again and my machine is going to start stitching and take off where it left off when my machine is stitching it's going to tell me what stitch number it's on and how many stitches are left to go it's going to tell me how much time is left and some other nice things that i can really track my progress with on this screen if i've stopped my embroidery it's going to still tell me what the total time is that i have left in my design and how much time i have left on just this color once our embroidery is done the machine is going to take us to our embroidery finish page if you are on a machine that has endless embroidery as an option so the 590 790 500 700 or the 880 you're actually going to have two different options you want to select the waving waving the the finish line flag but here we're just going to hit the green shack and it's going to take us back into our stitch out page this is a little bit different design because i wanted to actually stitch out one um so it didn't take quite as long to do this one than it did to do the tree in the initials so now is a good time if you wanted to go back to sewing to go into your hoop menu and go to park that embroidery module it's going to show us the animation of removing the hoop so go ahead and take your hoop off and that's going to say hey i'm going to move my arm now so make sure you don't have your coffee sitting right next to the machine and hit that check and the embroidery arm is going to go park on the far left so you can switch over to sewing you don't even have to take the module off you certainly can but you don't need to when i go home and go to sewing if i'm on a five or a seven series it will remind me to bring up my feed dogs so that i can go back to sewing on the on the sewing side of things so those are the basics we went through a lot of detail on editing and kind of how to adjust your embroidery designs but what i would really recommend is for you to get out your machine and just start stitching there really is no other way to do it but to start practicing so i encourage you not to be afraid of your machine just get the module on get some fabric and stabilizer hooped up and start sewing ask any questions that you need there are tons of experts out there but this at least will get you started on your path to embroidery you

Channel: Quilt Beginnings

Views: 41,189

Keywords: Bernina, Bernina Embroidery, Machine Embroidery, Bernina Embroidery help, Bernina Embroidery training, B 880 Embroidery, Bernina Embroidery module, B 790 Embroidery, B 770 Embroidery, B 590 Embroidery, How to Embroider on a Bernina, How to hoop fabric, stabilizer, embroidery thread, how to attach Bernina embroidery module, Basic Embroidery, Bernina Embroidery Basics, How to start embroidery on a Bernina, How to Calibrate a Bernina Embroidery Hoop, How to edit embroidery designs

Id: ZdXFzpPB15g

Length: 50min 50sec (3050 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020